Week 4 Day 1 – Floundering & Finding A Track

Week 3 Recap: Week 3 was a really floundery kind of week … I didn’t really get a lot done until Thursday, when I pulled an all-nighter, and wrote the first draft of the game project I’m working on now. The real epiphany moment was when I implemented Scrolling … then it was like I was working on something real for the first time … I love working at night, and being in the zone. It’s the most distraction free

Week 4 Day 1: Oh my gods – it’s Week 4 #Panic #HowIsThisPossible?!?!?!?! It’s going by so fast … I spent the morning just trying to catch up (after a busy weekend where I didn’t have any time to code :/) … then Mark Dominus was giving his talk on Unix History … then we had a Fire Alarm … eventually I got back into working & got some solid work on Draft 2 of the game done … later in the evening was Mark Dominus’ talk on Hashes/Hash Tables … which apparently ARE JUST DICTIONARIES (in the same way that Arrays are just Lists in Python… different name, same thing) … like wow, that clears up yet another obfuscated programming area … after that, I came back to The Space and started doing some work

So, now I’ve got a game with different zones, defined in in-file tile maps. It’s got back character movement, scrolling, health bar, some stationary monsters, background music, inventory screen, pause function, etc … lots of tweaks to make for the third incarnation.

I learned a strategy for dealing with Mental/Creative Blocks earlier … Instead of trying to work from the middle of a pre-existing program, just rewrite it … you can re-factor it as you go. (Not sure how practical this will be later on … but for right now, It’s a VERY GOOD approach for me, as it gets me past my mental blocks & lets me really reinforce & reabsorb everything I’m doing.)